Super Rebellion (XBOX Series X|S - Nintendo Switch - PC)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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Super Rebellion (XBOX Series X|S - Nintendo Switch - PC)

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TRASHSTORM - EPISODE VI
SUPERDISASTROUS SPACE SHOOTER SQUAD



Oh, God. Time to review a trash shmup again.
This time is Super Rebellion.



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Saban rejected my show, so I've joined the Super Rebellion.

The first thing we do on this game is to pick a difficulty. Right after that we have three options: A Tokusatsu hero called Lamen Finder, a Native American girl called Matutanka and another girl called Dandara. There's other four ships but they have to be unlocked. One hint about the cast: No matter who you pick, ALL OF THEM have the same crappy twin shot. That kills the concept of having multiple characters completely. In games like Aero Fighters and Blazing Star, having a team of unique characters means each of them have their own features like shots and special attacks in order to have a more strategic, more offensive, Hi-score based or even a powerless ship with a more difficult experience (I'm looking at you, Asayuki). In Super Rebellion's case, they feel like a re-skin of the first character, aesthetic differences and nothing more, except for minimal differences in the strength of their shots. This can be noticed in both Akira Sama and R&B, their shots are stronger than the rest of ships, so once you've unlocked him you would prefer to use his ship for the rest of the game.



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Simple, yet boring and later irritating.

With this aspect said and done, let's go with the gameplay. The game is a vertical scrolling shooter where the score mechanic is different from all the shmups you've played. While in any other game, a destroyed enemy adds points to the overall score, here they drop stars that you have to pick. That's your score obtained per each enemy. This score mechanic just simply don't make any logical sense on any known gaming term. I can easily understand the dropped stars if those were multipliers or even in-game currency to buy upgrades in between stages or before starting the game. Unfortunately, this game doesn't have shops or multipliers, rendering the gameplay to a very simple and basic level. Instead, your weaponry follows the same principle as X-Force Genesis: Each pad button is assigned to something. X is the Bomb that pelts the screen with explosions, Y is the Shield that grants you temporary invincibility and B is the Wide attack, which is a temporary Rapid-Spread Fire combination that becomes EXTREMELY useful in boss battles. However, you can only get weapons by killing enemies that drop the item randomly, 'cos you can get a weapon, a 1up or just nothing and keep flying disarmed with your crappy pea shooter which you can activate its autofiring by pressing both Left and Right Bumpers on the controller.



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The boss is asking for help? Such a big coward.

Boss battles are also different from your typical boss fight. Rather than fight the boss alone, the boss will throw you both "Popcorn" and "3-hits to die", I could say this is pretty much like the boss battles on Ginga Force, but there the boss sends them in certain circumstances like when all of its destructible weaponry is gone (Chapter 3), but all of them are the 1-hit-to-kill type of enemies and their cover fire varies based on the difficulty played, while in Super Rebellion, the boss support acts more cowardly. Speaking of difficulty, the boss health on Super Rebellion is one hell of a lifebar, especially if you're planning to take it down with your regular pea twin-shooter, along with that, the bosses pull cheap moves like fast laser sweeps that move faster than your ship or even use special bomb-like attacks with a large blast radius. Unfortunately, you can't counter those like in Metal Black, so you have to move out of the way and pray that nothing or no one hits you. The only "Best strategy" to survive is to spam the boss with the Wide special weapon and hope he doesn't move away until your special weapon's gauge depletes completely, which gonna happens later in the game as the boss goes all coward and either moves away or teleports and swoops diagonally dodging all your attacks. Also, this is one of those games where being damaged is fatal as it suffers from the Turridamage problem where you can get killed without being able to recover from the first hit faster than you can say Manfred Trenz, hence the reference to the classic computer game Turrican. Also, the ship's damage increases depending on the difficulty selected. I can accept the boss being able to take more damage, but when your life bar drops like flies with two or three shots, then we're talking shit. And for a final display of videogame idiocy, the life stock suffers the Super Mario Bros. flaw where life 1 is the zero of the game.



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Try to navigate an obstacle course while getting spammed with enemies.
It's a recipe for disaster.


Later in the game you'll be facing a trap segment that consists of navigate a rotating obstacle. This might not be a problem to do...if it wasn't navigating while dodging enemy fire. This is where having 1 or 2 spare Shields come in handy, you can navigate the obstacles and literally laugh at your enemies as you take'em down with no problems as long as your shield is active.



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THE DEATH OF ONE SOLDIER CAUSED A COUP OF THE MILITARY.
TWENTY THOUSAND MASS PRODUCED "BLACK FLY" FLEW INTO THE SKY AREA OF NEMESIS.


Graphically, its laughably bad. Especially the backgrounds which look like bad brush art from Photoshop that someone made in 2 minutes for a crappy flash game, although things improve a little in the later stages (Episodes 4 and 5). Also, the game's background is 80% Space, only the first level takes place on Earth, while the rest is in orbit and then in to the far reaches of Space. The character art is more based on western art as they're depicted in realistic style. Ironically in one of the cutscenes there's anime-styled men in a tank. I mean, if they bothered to nod anime there, why not on the player's characters. This western design also applies to the ships which they look like they came out of a bad Nickelodeon cartoon or something. The character cast borders on the goofiness like Tecmo's Eight Forces and Videosystem's Aero Fighters series as the cast involves an unusual team: A Tokusatsu superhero, a Native American girl, a girl with superpowers, a robotic ninja, a boxer, a couple of HAZMAT workers. The ship and enemy design looks averagely drawn and they're barely animated, which is dull and pathetic for XBOX Series X and Switch standards.
The sound department is heavily based on Japanese Tokusatsu shows of the 70-90's era such as Ultraman, Super Sentai (Saban's Power Rangers) and Gridman the Hyper Agent (Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad), known in Mexico and Latin America as Samurai Cibernético (Cybernetic Samurai). While the game tries to evoke that spirit, it becomes repetitive two minutes later, making you want to mute the game and play something else instead.



SUPER TRVIALLION

- Lamen Finder is a nod to Kamen Rider, or Masked Rider.
- R&B is a reference to "Rhythm & Blues".
- The name "Starman" could be a reference to many things such as a David Bowie song, superheroes, the 1984 film and even the Robot Master from Megaman V.
- Death Star refers to the Galactic Empire's station from Star Wars.
- 1st Angel is a reference to Adam, the first angel from the 1995 anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.




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No one is happy this time, Nina.
Not even Shizuka.


Item drop randomness, incoherent score mechanic, Turridamage, screwed up damage resistance, coward boss behaviour and "1 is Zero" rule, the result is a cocktail mix of failures. Super Rebellion is a shmup that tries to evoke old-school feelings and Tokusatsu nostalgia, but the sum of all its flaws kill the whole game lowering it to the same pathetic level of Gamerscore Milkers like Rocketio, X-Force Genesis and Razerwire: Nanowars.

Before going to the result on my Oh-so-common "Game Scale", I'll sum up this fucked up shit with a quote from Margaret Whitetail (Ginga Force): "Tsugi wa mosukoshi ganbarimasho" which means "Let's try harder next time".
Margaret's words are something that both Colossus Game Studio and Cube Games should put on practice on their next work.


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Cruel(tear-ed) mess of a game.
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